Café-concerts were popular venues for drinking and entertainment in late nineteenth-century Paris and attracted the interest of artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The Moulin Rouge, which opened in 1889, was the most famous of the café-concerts, and Toulouse-Lautrec was a habitué of the establishment—he even had a permanently reserved table. His painting Equestrienne (1887–88), now also in the Art Institute’s collection, was acquired by the owner of the nightclub as decoration for the lobby. At the Moulin Rouge is a cleverly observed group portrait of the (in some cases) infamous customers and entertainers who formed part of the artist’s circle. Standing in the background, the dancer La Goulue arranges her hair. Seated at the table are dancers La Macarona and Jane Avril, as well as photographer Paul Sescau, poet Édouard Dujardin, and vintner Maurice Guibert. Singer May Milton peers out from the right edge of the painting, her face harshly lit and a shocking acid green—the Moulin Rouge was designed to have electric lighting and Toulouse-Lautrec reveled in the artistic possibilities of artificial glare. The artist himself appears in the center background of the painting, a diminutive figure accompanied by his much taller cousin, the physician Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran.

In 1886 Vincent van Gogh left his native Holland and settled in Paris, where his beloved brother Theo was a dealer in paintings. Van Gogh was apparently inspired by the energy of the city and by his introduction to Impressionism, and he created at least twenty-four self-portraits during his two-year stay in the French capital. This early example is modest in size and was painted on prepared artist’s board rather than canvas. Its densely dabbed brushwork, which became a hallmark of Van Gogh’s style, reflects the artist’s response to Georges Seurat’s revolutionary pointillist technique in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884. What was for Seurat a method based on the cool objectivity of science became in Van Gogh’s hands an intense emotional language. The surface of the painting dances with particles of color—intense greens, blues, reds, and oranges. Dominating this dazzling array of staccato dots and dashes are the artist’s deep green eyes and the intensity of their gaze. “I prefer painting people’s eyes to cathedrals,” Van Gogh once wrote to Theo. “However solemn and imposing the latter may be—a human soul, be it that of a poor streetwalker, is more interesting to me.” From Paris, Van Gogh traveled to the southern town of Arles for fifteen months. At the time of his death, in 1890, he had actively pursued his art for only five years. Van Gogh’s career as a painter was actually very brief. From Paris, he traveled to the southern town of Arles for fi ft een months. At the time of his death, in 1890, he had actively pursued his art for just five years. This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection.

Katsushika Hokusai’s much celebrated series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjûrokkei), was begun in 1830, when the artist was 70 years old. This tour-de-force series established the popularity of landscape prints, which continues to this day. Perhaps most striking about the series is Hokusai’s copious use of the newly affordable Berlin blue pigment, featured in many of the compositions in the color for the sky and water. Mount Fuji is the protagonist in each scene, viewed from afar or up close, during various weather conditions and seasons, and from all directions. The most famous image from the set is the "Great Wave" (Kanagawa oki nami ura), in which a diminutive Mount Fuji can be seen in the distance under the crest of a giant wave. The three impressions of Hokusai’s Great Wave in the Art Institute are all later impressions than the first state of the design.

The Child’s Bath is a tender portrayal of familial closeness, a subject that Mary Cassatt explored throughout her career. The caregiver’s cheek brushing the child’s shoulder, her encircling embrace, and the child’s pudgy hand on her knee suggest an emotional bond between the two. Captivated by a large exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris in 1890, Cassatt set out to produce a series of color prints influenced by Japanese aesthetics. She then continued her investigation across media, culminating in this bold composition, with its dramatically flattened picture plane, decorative patterning, and bright palette.

Little did Claude Monet know that the water garden he created three years after buying his Giverny, France, property in 1890 would become his primary inspiration over the next two and a half decades. These paintings, numbering around 250, mark Monet’s artistic journey from more straightforward depictions of the pond spanned by the wooden Japanese bridge to the monumental and near-abstract series on the water lily theme he made in preparation for his murals at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris between 1914 and 1926. Water Lilies, one of a group of paintings on the subject made between 1903 and 1908, comes at the midpoint of Monet’s developing style and spatial experimentations. The nearly square format underscores his move away from painting the conventional zones of land, sky, and water to focus solely on the water’s surface. Clusters of water lilies at bottom left and top right frame a watery path, while the water’s surface reflects trees and clouds. Although the dreamlike quality of floating forms might seem to be a natural development for the artist, he considered these works “an obsession,” a sentiment borne out by technical examinations on the Art Institute’s canvas, revealing many significant changes made to the painting in progress.

This monumental painting is Gustave Caillebotte’s largest, most ambitious work and has been a visitor favorite since the Art Institute acquired it in 1964, well before the artist’s contributions to the Impressionist movement were widely recognized. Caillebotte captured a busy intersection of Paris that was only a short walk from his home. In fact, his paintings of Paris rarely depict areas beyond his familiar neighborhoods. Caillebotte demonstrated his affinity with the Impressionists through his subject of modern urban life but approached these settings with a more Realist technique. The dramatic cropping of the scene may have been inspired by the newly popularized medium of photography; the two central figures seem to be walking straight into the viewer as something captures their attention outside of the frame. At the time, artists rarely attempted to depict people in motion; Caillebotte carefully placed each of the background figures to evoke the feeling of bustling city streets. When he started exhibiting with the Impressionists, Caillebotte also focused on portraying the atmosphere of his scenes; here, instead of explicitly painting raindrops to indicate the weather, he suggests it through the incorporation of newly available retractable umbrellas and the subtle reflections on the wet cobblestones.

Perhaps the most famous depiction of a bedroom in Western art history, this vibrant painting documents Vincent van Gogh’s sleeping quarters in his beloved “Yellow House” in Arles, France. The composition exists in three versions, the first of which Van Gogh conceived in October 1888, a month after he moved into the home. In a letter to his brother Theo, he described having painted “the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green.” With its bold colors, thick and broken brushwork, and sharply receding lines, the picture might suggest a nervous energy. But the artist understood it as a calming and restful image. The painting in the Art Institute’s collection is Van Gogh’s second version of the scene, made nearly a year after the first, in September 1889. He produced a third, smaller version at the same time as a gift for his mother and sister.

In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris’s best friend Cameron Frye intensely studies this nearly ten-foot-wide painting during a scene set at the Art Institute. Featuring people of every age and social class on the banks of the River Seine, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 has captivated visitors ever since its arrival at the museum in 1924. If we, like Cameron, come closer to the painting, figures and forms dissolve into dots and dashes of complementary colors laid side by side, characteristic of Seurat’s pointillist technique. Many smaller painted and drawn sketches and several larger canvases, in which Seurat laid out the parameters for the landscape and figures, led up to this majestically composed scene. Seurat returned to the work two years after its start date, amplifying the silhouettes of some figures and adding others. Some of these, like the monkey on the leash, seem so integral to the final composition that it is hard to imagine them as add-ons, but others, like the man carrying a rolled newspaper in the furthest distance, are barely noticeable. To the artist, however, every decision was essential to his aim of making a painting of modern life equivalent to a classical Greek frieze.

The Barcelona Pavilion. Built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1929 for the Universal exhibition. reconstruction 1983–1989

A exposure blended photo of the Sydney Opera House , as viewed from the Sydney Harbour Bridge . Taken by myself with a Canon 5D and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from Northwest. Three sculptures from the museum's collection can be seen outside: Tulips by Jeff Koons , Tall Tree & The Eye by Anish Kapoor , and Maman by Louise Bourgeois . The Salve Bridge stands out with its red portico.

Bauhaus building in Dessau-Roßlau, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

Designed by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand : LC4 Chaise longue in the Villa Savoye

Fallingwater

Fallingwater , by Frank Lloyd Wright

La fameuse Table-basse du designer nippon-américan Isamu Noguchi, présentée lors de l'exposition "Art nouveau Revival" au musée d'Orsay. Noguchi coffee table

Wassily Chair also known as the Model B3 chair designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925-1926 at the Bauhaus , in Dessau , Germany.

LCW (Lounge Chair Wood) Chair by Charles and Ray Eames, designed 1945-46, molded plywood, teakwood veneer, rubber shock mounts, Honolulu Museum of Art accession 4410.1

Egg chair - Arne Jacobsen (1958)

Hans Wegner Wishbone chair

Barcelona Chair photographed in situ at the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion.

Ngv design, ludwig mies van der rohe & co, barcelona chair

View of a Vespa GT in the Classic Car Boot Sale

Tischlampe di Carl Jakob Jucker (left, 1923-24) e di Wilhelm Wagenfeld (right, 1924) (cropped)